Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Installation procedure was pretty straightforward. First connect camera with USB cable. A note "New HW detected" will appear on screen. Also notification "Problem detected ... might not work properly" is seen, ignore this one. Start software installation from the disk supplied. First select "Install driver" -option, then continue with "Install IC Capture.AS". When software is started, the live image from camera shall be visible.I used two "targets" for testing, sample grey card and a small stamp. Both were imaged with MF Nikkor 55/2.8 lens attached. I ajusted gray card exposure to get three "spikes" visible on histogram. I still need to play around with camera settings, to get a best estimate for first astro imaging session.

Camera is equipped with 1.25"/C -adapter. In my William Optics SCT grayford focuser 2"-1.25" adapters brass compression ring is bit too wide for 1.25"/C adapter. Hopefully this does not cause any problems "in the field". There is another ring (C/CS adapter?) also in camera, this I do not need in my imaging setup.

Now I only need clear skies, weather forecast looks a bit more promising. Clear skies were estimated at night between friday and saturday...

Friday, October 16, 2009

Image from the archives.... Soon after midnight at 4th September 2009, full moon was near enough for composing it with urban landscape (tower of local church).Clouds passed by occasionally, totally blocking visibility. I had to move my tripod to new position after few minutes. Attached frame was the best composition I got. Image was taken at Espoo, southern Finland.

Last winter I got frustrated of fiddling with my SPC900NC. I did not get good combination to camera settings. In many occasions, strong banding interference was visible on raw video. After stacking it was awful to watch.

After considering choices between Lumenera, Imaging Source and Point Grey, I decided to go on with Imaging Source. Model I chose was DMK31AU03. For planets I would have had enough field of view with model DMK21AU04, but DMK31AU03 offers slightly wider field of view for sun and moon (used with C8 OTA). I now start without separate RGB filters, to get familiar with camera and it's controls. Hopefully the camera and software proves itself worth of investment. The camera (plus UV/IR block filter) should arrive soon.

About Me

I'm 36 years old, currently living in southern Finland. One of my hobbies is nature photography. I got my SLR about eight years ago, nowadays I am mainly using digital SLR.
To areas in nature photography have been especially interesting to me, atmospheric phenomenons and nightsky. With this blog I share my experiences, interests and thoughts. Feel free to browse around!